Thoughts on operating systems, software engineering and beyond

Monthly Archives: March 2007

Hold on, I did not mean that I was selling my laptop for free. I am not selling it at all and I am more than happy with it as it is 100% free (libre) when I am using Ubuntu. There is no proprietary driver used even for 3D or Wi-Fi.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn offers a new tool about restricted drivers in the administration section which deals with restricted drivers.
I was curious about its functionalities and I launched it.Continue reading →

In the up coming Gnome 2.18, there have been several improvement of the Gnome Power Management applet. It still does the job of easily configuring many options that reduce power consumption. But recently it offers a power history.

This functionality is accessible upon right click on the applet icon. It displays a neat little plot of the power level of your battery and of various ACPI-related events (like session idle, suspend, etc.) I find it quite useful to see if the power management policies chosen are applied and if they could be optimised.

On your right is a screenshot of the power history (click the image to enlarge).

I was just playing around with Google Trends and I thought of showing the result of one of my search.

You can see on the figure (or directly at Google Trends) the evolution of search request perform by users of the Google web search engine in 2005 and 2006.

At the beginning of 2005, Ubuntu was rather new, hence the growing number of request over 2005 and 2006. I have no explanation about the sudden rise of Vista in the beginning of the second 2005 semester.

So was Ubuntu more popular than Vista in 2006? Well if by just using Google Trends we would have such an answer that would be easy, but this is only one factor amongst many. So you can think of your own good idea.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (the development codename) has a fairly easy way to enable write mode on NTFS partitions. Writing on such partition is safe since release 1.0 of NTFS-3G, and it is included in Ubuntu Feisty’s Universe repository.

You can now either update manually your partition configuration file (/etc/fstab) to use ntfs-3g driver instead of the default ntfs. Or you could use the ntfs-config package which does the trick taking care for you about the local settings or external hard drive. Who said Linux was not easy?